As businesses rely more on software for their workflows and business decisions, software user interfaces have become crowded and complex. Display screens have become inundated with burgeoning business workflows with additional steps for more roles and more scenarios, data fields for each rare use case, and in-context reports and impact analyses reflecting ever-broadening sets of data gathered by business intelligence and analytics tools. This is in addition to the multiple applications, whether integrated or not, that need to be used simultaneously to complete a task. Corporate software users are facing a distracting amount of information on a single screen, something that has been handled by sectioning the screen into areas of interest, dividing information into relevant tabs, or adding additional display monitors to the system. In all of these solutions, the same general interface is used to interact with the data, e.g., a mouse and keyboard.
Further, the modern computer user has become comfortable with, and adept at, using a personal mobile device to augment daily tasks. Smartphones and tablets have considerable computing power and ubiquity, to the point that they are replacing the personal computer for many tasks. The explosive growth of, and reliance on, mobile devices has made them a common sight in people's hands while, for example, waiting in line, riding a bus, conversing with others, or glancing at a newsfeed or the clock. Mobile devices have become one way to augment people's daily lives and tasks with information. For example, during family television viewing some may have a mobile device on hand for either keeping abreast of unrelated information during television programming lulls, or for expanded data about what is being watched, such as reading Twitter feeds while watching coverage of an election night or natural disaster for commentary and immediate updates. This use of mobile devices to augment television viewing has been called the “second screen” phenomenon, and some programs and channels have leveraged it to provide an application with synchronized data that augments what the viewer is watching.